The Helping Structure

I am motivated by the opportunity to help others, so the best way for me to structure work is by thinking about how what I’m building is going to help others help others.

It starts with Designing — choosing constraints and crafting balance across them — your highest-order outcome with measurable impact over the longest timeframe or widest population. This 1st-Order outcome should be defined in terms of a few core constraints with resonant measures, which when satisfied unlock value. The outcomes satisfying these constraints are unknown as yet and must be delegated to the Helping Structure for design and execution using the processes of Ideation, Circulation, and Manifestation. Ideation happens when people assemble options for lower-order outcomes that fulfill some of the mandating criteria. Circulation is the act of rotating them into and out of position in the structure to see whether they both support the objective AND the system can detect line-of-sight to the organization’s current state, without which Manifestation is impossible.

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All human work in complex systems embodies a common set of structures, grounded in the nature of individual and collective communication, cognition, and relation. The first structure that I will describe is the most central, visible, stable, and arguably the most important to grasp because the other structures build upon it. I call it the Helping Structure. It is a foundational way of envisioning work that accumulates value and good from efforts taken anywhere — across all artificial boundaries of self, team, business, industry, class, country, or species.

First a couple of definitions of terms — always good to start out on the same page, even if we end up in different sets of encyclopedias. For the purposes of this discussion of work an outcome is a minimally-extant thing, a negative space, defined by — not described by, not distinguished by, defined by — its constraints. As we saw in “All Work Is The Same” constraints are the gateways to value, those qualities of an outcome that must be satisfied for the stakeholder to realize a benefit. Not all constraints are created equal, as we will see. Some are more requisite than others, delivering benefits to a larger group or with greater effectiveness. But every constraint is valuable because every constraint contains information about the benefit the stakeholder demands, and reveals their internal Priority Structure (the topic of the next post).

I risk conflict by asking you to engage with this definition of an outcome in terms of its substance — its constraints — rather than with the form that it takes. It requires a mental inversion. For purposes of cognitive simplicity we habitually reify outcomes, relating to them as entities in themselves synechdotally. In its full context any outcome is an ephemera, the result of effort taken to satisfy constraints and realize a benefit, part of a felt systemic awareness occupying a vast network of cognition throughout the individual and corporate body. This level of acute awareness is generally unsustainable, so we have developed the capacity of synecdoche by which we simplify and compress the fullness of context into a symbol: the Outcome, and through reification place the Outcome into our mental model of work in place of the full context. So an Outcome feels like a real thing, separate from ourselves, and its “qualities” feel like attributes of it rather than states of our own consciousness. I am asking you to invert this relationship and treat the constraints as more real than the outcome they define.

Why? What do you gain from this effort? When we re-open ourselves to the full context of our work, and relate to the outcome as an extension of ourselves rather than something separate from ourselves, we give the outcome and thus ourselves the potential to have dynamic living responsive existence as a means of meeting the real needs of others. The alternative is to treat the Outcome as its own mouth to feed, a source of obligation and servitude.

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A Helping Structure begins to form around an outcome by which someone expects to benefit, but cannot accomplish alone. I will illustrate using the example of Requisite Agility, the business-redefinition movement dreamed up over a decade ago by Amit Arora (I have become very familiar with RA and endorse it, that’s why I am signal boosting RA here). In Requisite Agility, Amit is creating an outcome that enables any organization to sense and interact with its environment peacefully and powerfully, by offering consulting, education, tools, and investment opportunities that increase the organization’s sensitivity to internal and external processes at greater and lesser timescales, and to position itself to thrive in its milieu.

We can envision the Requisite Agility (RA) outcome defined by four main constraints:

• Helpfulness,
• Market Reach,
• Profitability, and
• Sustainability.

Amit cannot benefit from RA until all four are satisfied to some degree, and he cannot make them all happen on his own, so he must delegate the satisfaction of these constraints to helpers. His job then will be to make it as easy as possible for the helpers to see how their efforts are impacting the status of these constraints, and then provide them with resources with which to work on them.

Let’s say that Amit places me in charge of satisfying the Helpfulness constraint.

This constraint can in turn be reframed as a lower-order outcome defined by its own constraints. (It’s easy to do this, just add the word “Operation:” to any constraint and voila! it becomes an outcome.)

My initial efforts at defining the success criteria for “Operation: Helpfulness” suggests a number of constraints each of which can move the needle on how Helpful RA can be for its clients. Let’s start with four constraints on “Operation: Helpfulness” which unlock value when satisfied:

• improving the client’s Sensing of internal and external processes or energies,
• improving the client’s Interactions with internal and external processes or energies
• improving the client’s Peacefulness
• improving the client’s Power

These suggest interactive component parts, Methods for accomplishing each goal i.e. satisfying each constraint. Each Method may have consulting, education, tooling, and investment (M&A, internal APPortunity events, etc) components depending on where the client needs help.

I could transform the Sensing constraint into an outcome called RA Sense (mandated of course by the Helpfulness constraint on the higher-order RA outcome), a SaaS tool which enables an organization to improve its sensitivity to vital internal and external processes. This outcome must:

• allow an organization to identify a vital process,
• define the manifestations of the process,
• liberate creativity on ways to develop more information on the status of the process or to develop it more quickly, and
• link up the improved sensitivity with internal and external organizational goals.

If you look closely you will see that these are constraints defining the new RA Sense outcome.

And if I have a team with reasonably appropriate skills we can Manifest it, that is, delegate these constraints to the team and have them develop the sub-outcome(s) to meet them.

Once I do that, I could move on to transform the 2nd-order Interaction constraint into an outcome called RA Interact (again mandated by the 1st-order Helpfulness constraint) which enables an organization to affect and be affected by the processes which it senses — perhaps with the help of RA Sense. RA Interact must:

• characterize the systemic actions within the organization that affect the process, either dampening or heightening it, elongating or shortening its wavelength, or changing it in other detectable ways;
• allow the organization to set and meet targets for these processes; and
• send interventions into the process either within the organization or to the elements of an external process which are proximal to the organization.

Whoa! That looks like another constraint-defined outcome, each constraint of which is unique enough to mandate its own team assignment and measurable enough to produce good quality work.

Here is what the Helping Structure looks like so far, with one corner getting a little bit built out.

But we are missing the outer half of the picture, where the rubber hits the road: line-of-sight from outcome to skill and personnel.

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At this point I’ve done a bit of Ideation and feel quite proud of myself, but my colleague may look at the proposed solution and ask, “Who are you going to put to work on these sub-outcomes? I don’t think your team is built for that kind of project.” And I take a look at the team and realize my colleague is correct, these are all people people and not tools people.

In fact my team is skilled at building training offerings and not toolsets. I’ve ideated a couple of tools-y outcomes, probably because I have a bias towards tools-y, but obviously my work isn’t done. The RA Sense and RA Interact outcomes require different skills than the ones my team has. My team is the wrong “shape” for these Ideas to Manifest.

I’m not seeing a fit between my team and my ideal outcomes, so I do not have “line-of-sight” from my mandate through my solutions to my team.

My mandate is fixed, and to some extent my team is fixed, so I need to think of another solution or two. Other than a SaaS Tool, perhaps I can imagine a financial instrument that would incent the right Interaction behaviors, and I can also envision a consulting offering. Now I Circulate these solutions through my Helping Structure to assess line-of-sight from the mandate to the team.

From this view it looks to me like the Consulting Offering idea will be a good option for an outcome! It can cover all the bases that the SaaS tool might have covered, and the Team has the skills to Manifest it.

As I run a similar Circulation exercise on the Sense outcome…

I can see that maybe both outcomes can be manifest in a single offering! They seem similar enough…

So lets clean this up a bit: I imagine a different outcome, call it RA Mindsetting, which takes advantage of the skills of my team. RAM will enable specific people in an organization to connect with and improve their own Sensing skills and Interaction skills, to learn how to identify and analyze vital processes, measure their effects within and without the organization, and to take action to change them in pursuit of organizational goals. This immediately brings to mind a lot of other constraints that would have to be in place for the marketing and deployment of the training to work — for instance it could not be aimed at low-level staff, it must be aimed at powerful officials within the organization who will participate with their staff and learn to delegate power to them in order to take advantage of the opportunities the training provides.

In any event this outcome has its own suite of constraints, to whom I can delegate authority to each team member to satisfy. They then can ideate their own lower-order outcomes and design them to satisfy these mandates, and my job becomes to make it obvious to them how well their outcomes meet the mandating constraints so they can steer their efforts.

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Musical Interlude:

This is a lot like writing a bass line in a rock song when you have a drum part and a guitar part. The drum part is like the RA outcome with its Helpfulness parameter — fundamental, bedrock, the grounding principle. The team skillset is like the guitar part, visible, attention-getting, the thing that’s affecting people right now. The bassline links them up, providing the right feel and groove for the guitar to really stand out. If the drummer plays a 4-on-the-floor beat, and the guitar part is a ringing reverb-drenched wash of effects, then I can’t stick a reggae bassline in there, because it will not highlight the emotional elements of either part. So I have to play straight-eighths like Larry Mullin, and that will work great.

The reggae bassline is like the first set of outcomes that I thought of, which depend on highly analytical business process expertise. Problem is my team is skilled in adult development and team training, elicitation and elucidation. So I need to swap out the old idea for new ones.

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I call this the Helping Structure because it helps Amit achieve his first-order constraints and it helps the team manifest emergent skill. The actions are Ideating, Circulating, and Manifesting. Ideation & Circulation replace one set of mandated outcomes and constraints with another set of equally useful mandated outcomes and constraints so we can evaluate line-of-sight to the skillset of my team.

If all of Amits’ RA Outcome constraints have people working on them in similar ways, then we see a Schematic of the Helping Structure like this:

Of course each of those lower-order outcomes has its own constraints mandating still lower-order outcomes, and the circulation of outcomes in order to fit the skillsets of the people involved never ends.